For a couple of days I was coming across a sponsored post from Licious on my FaceBook feed. Licious is an app that lets you order meat and sea-food online. They have got chicken, turkey, goat meat, a couple of fishes and other sea-foods. The most interesting thing is you can order unprocessed (just cleaned and cut into pieces) or marinated meat. This is what makes it different from big basket. I am a working person living in a hostel having very limited cooking skills.
Fish and meat were part of my daily meals as long as I was with my family. Since I moved out, I have been ordering a lot from outside. With my own enthusiasm I have learnt little bit of cooking vegetables but still I cannot handle non-veg items.
First of all, for cooking meat/fish, you need to go to the super-market, local fish-market or a butcher’s shop. You have to pick your meat, stand in a queue in the disgusting smell and buy it. But that’s not the end of it, after paying all those money and bearing with the nasty smell, you have to clean that shit before starting the actual cooking process. I have the smell of raw meat and fish, the cleaning process disgusts me as well. I searched for packaged meat in super-markets here in Hyderabad but didn’t find any for obvious reasons. Why would people buy processed and medicated meat when they can buy fresh in half the price. Ain’t nobody got issues like me! However, I managed to find pre-packed basa fish and prawns online.
Now coming to the cooking part- my mom is an excellent cook, even my dad cooks quite fine… but I got nothing from them. I tried cooking meat for a couple of times. I swear to God, that was the worst nightmare I have ever had. I don’t know how meat is cooked in other countries but cooking in authentic bengali style calls for some skill… you gotta have the proportions of spices right. It took so much effort and didn’t turn out well, I could not make myself eat that even after considering the amount of time and effort I put into it.
After seeing the ad from Licious, I had a quick look at the reviews. Many of the users have complained about the time and price of the product. However I could find some positive reviews as well about the quality and freshness. I downloaded the app and placed my first order – “Achari Murgh Tikka”. It cost me around 330 Rs for half kg. So it is a popular check dish here and they are gonna deliver me the marinated chicken. The payment options were fine- card and cash both were available. Estimated time was 120 mins, as soon as I placed the order, it started showing me the status of the order. For every step you’ll get a message on your registered phone number.
I placed the order around 7:30 in the evening, after reading the reviews I didn’t expect getting the order delivered any soon. It came by 9:15 or so. The packaging was really cool, the chicken was cut into small pieces, mixed with spices and packaged in an air-locked plastic. As per the instruction written on the box, I kept the meat open in the room temperature for like 10 minutes, there was no other instruction given. I just heated some oil in a pan and threw the pieces in. It was smelling really nice but I was skeptical about the salt. Did they give salt as well, probably not! It was cooked pretty fast but I was kept them a little longer on the pan, the spices, the taste was as amazing as it was smelling. I didn’t have to add salt- it was already perfect to taste. The chicken was tender and fresh. I must not take any credit but I felt so accomplished after it was done. Considering the price I could get the same amount of chicken from a restaurant as well, but would I have got the feeling of a world-class chef? No!
My second order was fresh water Katla fish (INR 335 for 500 grams). This time I opted for unprocessed one. The fish was cleaned and cut into pieces- a little bit of blood was still there. It was not a big deal to clean it. I had to mix the spices and fry them. It was a good experience indeed.
I am writing this review after my first 2 orders from the app but I will surely return to add my experience in the later orders. After all for any brand, it is necessary to be consistent in supplying the good quality of service to stay in business.
Licious came into existence in 2016 and currently it’s operating in NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. There is no better alternative to buying fresh meat/fish from local market but if you are someone like me- don’t have time to go to market or hate the process of cleaning, Licious is worth a try at the cost of some extra bucks.
That’s all folks. Thanks for reading. 🙂
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